Read The Wit And Wisdom Of Discworld for Free Online

lawnmower!’
    *
    The Rite of AshkEnte, quite simply, summons and binds Death. Students of the occult will be aware that it can be performed with a simple incantation, three small bits of wood and 4cc of mouse blood, but no wizard worth his pointy hat would dream of doing anything so unimpressive; they knew in their hearts that if a spell didn’t involve big yellow candles, lots of rare incense, circles drawn on the floor with eight different colours of chalk and a few cauldrons around the place then it simply wasn’t worth contemplating.
    *
    The wizards have escaped unscathed from an encounter with their long-dead founder, whose statue had hitherto graced the campus.
    ‘I propose here and now we replace the statue [said the bursar]. And to make sure no students deface it in any way I suggest we then erect it in the deepest cellar.
    ‘And then lock the door,’ he added. Several wizards began to cheer up.
    ‘And throw away the key?’ said Rincewind.
    ‘And weld the door,’ the bursar said. ‘And then brick up the doorway’ There was a round of applause.
    ‘And throw away the bricklayer!’ chortled Rincewind, who felt he was getting the hang of this.
    The bursar scowled at him. ‘No need to get carried away’ he said.
    *
    The princess sprang to her feet and launched herself at her uncle, but Cutwell grabbed her.
    ‘No,’ he said, quietly. ‘This isn’t the kind of man who ties you up in a cellar with just enough time for the mice to eat your ropes before the flood-waters rise. This is the kind of man who just kills you here and now.’
    *
    ‘It’s not that I mind being a duke,’ said Mort. ‘It’s being married to a duchess that comes as a shock.’

    I WASN’T CUT OUT TO BE A FATHER, AND CERTAINLY NOT A GRANDAD . I HAVEN’T GOT THE RIGHT KIND OF KNEES .
    The Disc’s greatest lovers were undoubtedly Mellius and Gretelina, whose pure, passionate and soul-searing affair would have scorched the pages of History if they had not, because of some unexplained quirk of fate, been born two hundred years apart on different continents.
    *
    Ankh-Morpork had dallied with many forms of government and had ended up with that form of democracy known as One Man, One Vote. The Patrician was the Man; he had the Vote.

 
    T HERE was an eighth son of an eighth son. He was, naturally, a wizard. And there it should have ended. However (for reasons we’d better not go into), he had seven sons. And then he had an eighth son … a wizard squared … a source of magic… a Souircerer.
    Far below, the sea sucked on the shingle as noisily as an old man with one tooth who had been given a gob-stopper.
    *
    ‘Children are our hope for the future.’
    T HERE IS NO HOPE FOR THE FUTURE , said Death.
    ‘What does it contain, then?’
    M E .
    ‘Besides you I mean!’
    Death gave him a puzzled look. I’ M SORRY ?
    *
    ‘What is there in this world that makes living worth while?’
    Death thought about it.
    C ATS , he said eventually, C ATS ARE NICE.
    *
    There was no analogy for the way in which Great A ‘Tuin the world turtle moved against the galactic night. When you are ten thousand miles long, your shell pocked with meteor craters and frosted with comet ice, there is absolutely nothing you can realistically be like except yourself.
    So Great A’Tuin swam slowly through the interstellar deeps like the largest turtle there has ever been, carrying on its carapace the four huge elephants that bore on their backs the vast, glittering waterfall-fringed circle of the Discworld, which exists either because of some impossible blip on the curve of probability or because the gods enjoy a joke as much as anyone.
    *
    Spring had come to Ankh-Morpork. It wasn’t immediately apparent, but there were signs that were obvious to the cognoscenti. For example, the scum on the River Ankh, that great wide slow waterway that served the double city as reservoir, sewer and frequent morgue, had turned a particularly iridescent green. The city’s drunken